Oh how wonderful it is to have real juicy salad leaves! Things are starting to move fast now for my indoor salads. Lettuce seeds are germinating within a day or two, and the peashoots are growing up so fast these days as well.

Week 9

This week I’ve been eating young salad leaves. I love ‘salad bowl’ lettuces from their adolescence onwards. These leaves are ready to eat and are so juicy and tender.

I prefer to leave ‘salad bowl’ when it is outside to grow into its large oak-leaved form, where it deepens to a dark red and fills a sandwich with just two large leaves. Five ‘salad bowl’ lettuce plants can last me all season as I pick their leaves every day for my lunch.

I very much doubt I’ll get that sort of result indoors on my windowsill (although I am going to try anyhow). So I’m harvesting the leaves now.

I tend to pick individual leaves at the base of each plant rather than harvesting them in their entirety. So I suppose you’d call these pick-and-pick -again lettuce leaves. It means I get the largest leaves each time, and leave the plants to develop, thus never having a real gap while a patch that has been cut back needs to re-grow.

This week I sowed

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